The use of mail service to fill prescriptions has been highly successful in lowering the costs of providing drugs to consumers. The filling of prescriptions and mailing the filled prescriptions to consumers is labor intensive and a pharmacy can significantly reduce its costs, improve quality, and reduce turn around time by automating the prescription filling and assembling procedures.
Semi-automated prescription dispensing machines which can automatically count the tablets or capsules of a unique prescription have had a significant impact in the drug industry. However, use of these machines still require many manual steps to complete a patient's order. For example, the positioning of the bottle under the proper chute is controlled by a technician or pharmacist and after filling the bottle, the prescription has to be further handled manually to effect mailing of the prescription to the patient.
Patients or families using mail services to fill prescriptions often receive multiple prescriptions. Data suggests that about 50 percent of mail service for prescription drugs involves orders for at least two separate prescriptions. The advantages of a system which automatically fills the respective separate prescriptions, combines the prescriptions of each order and prepares the orders for mailing are readily apparent. An automated system would produce great labor savings in what heretofore has been a highly labor intensive process and at the same time wold reduce time required to process prescriptions.
While the advantages of such a system are apparent, there are a number of problems which have to be solved in order to automatically fill and combine multiple prescription orders into a single package. The multiple parts of an order have to be brought automatically into close proximity at a packaging location. There is a need to place literature about the prescriptions in each shipping container along with the prescription. Any system which automatically distributes drugs must have a number of controls and checks to insure that the correct prescription is filled into the correct bottle which has been labeled correctly and the correct bottle is placed in the correct shipping container. Any deviation from the correct operations and handling of the prescription could be expected to have serious consequences. Lastly, in order to be economical for its intended purpose, the system must operate a high volume throughput.